Madeline Gins, _The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader_, ed. Lucy Ives, Part 2

 I SHOULD HAVE gone on to mention the other main sections of the book,  I now realize.

Much of the excerpt from What the President Will Say and Do!! is all-caps declarations such as "FILL THE OCEAN WITH COTTON!" and "USE FIRE AS A PULLEY." The nifty thing about the declarations is that one can (1) read them as being in the imperative mode, in that the President will order his administration to fill the ocean with cotton or urge the citizenry to use fire as a pulley, or (2) read them as being in the indicative mode, preceded by an implied "The President will," as in "[The President will] fill the ocean with cotton" or "[The President will] use fire as a pulley." Thus, any of the declarations could be about something the President will say OR something the President will do. 

Either way, saying or doing, supposedly matters immensely, the President being our chief executive, but at the same time all the statements occur within the structures of English, and thus (as in Word Rain) can be clear and meaningful yet have no reliable or guaranteed relationship to actuality, to the world of observable phenomena. Language's structure permits one to state plainly and unambiguously that one wishes the ocean filled with cotton, or that one intends to fill the ocean with cotton, without any regard at all for the sheer impossibility of the thing. That language lets us conceptualize the impossible may be important.

In the May 2024 edition of Poetry, Lisa Jarnot wrote of one day writing some lines in which she felt she lifted clear of the goals she had originally set for her own poetry, i.e., "to SAY SOMETHING, DO SOMETHING, and GO SOMEWHERE! to get at the empathy I had for the world and to pour out my own feeling states." The lines she had just written (which wound up in "Triptych") did not seem to issue from her design or intentions or any kind of purposefulness, but to be a kind of "revelation": "It was not about what I was  trying to make the poem say but about what the poem was trying to make me say." 

I think What the President Will Say and Do!! similarly juggles with the idea that our saying and doing, our going somewhere, may benefit from lifting clear of the our own intentions and designs, our own sense of the possible, and language's infinite versatility can help lift us...if we let it.

Ives also includes three chapters from Gins's Helen Keller or Arakawa, in which Gins sets some of her husband's artworks in relation to Keller's own discussions of her perceptual apparatus, which gets into  the bigger question of what the imagination owes the senses. I can't tell for ceratan whether Gins had read Helen Keller's The World I Live In, but I bet she had. Probably Diderot's Lettre sur les Aveugles too.